A singing bird box (boîte à oiseau chanteur in French) is a box, usually rectangular-shaped, which contains within a miniature automaton singing bird concealed below an oval lid and activated by means of an operating lever.
Its origins are found in the city of Geneva and its invention in 1784/85 is attributed to Pierre Jaquet-Droz.
The French term tabatière has also come to be used for any small decorative box resembling a snuffbox in form but not necessarily any longer used to contain snuff.
Characteristics This object is made up of two separate parts, habitually crafted by different makers. The outer casing is a rectangular box variable in size, although with a standard measurement of approximately 100 × 65 × 40 mm, made of base metal, precious metal, tortoiseshell or other materials. It has an oval hole, some 45 x 35 mm in its top, edged normally by a decorative metal bezel.
On the front of the box there is a small slider that when it is pushed to the right, the lid or medallion lifts to a near-vertical position, and a small, mechanical feathered bird pops through a grille and stands upright at the front centre of the oval opening. Then it begins to turn from side to side, to flap its wings, move its tail up and down, open and shut its beak and – in some cases – turn its head from side to side, while producing an unbroken stream of birdsong. At the end of the performance the automaton falls back into the box and the lid closes.
While the bird is calling, a decorative pierced grille appears with a bird-shaped hole cut into it through which the performer rises and falls. While singing, a bird-shaped piece of grille jumps up to cover the hole through which the automaton has passed.
All bird box movements have a clock-work motor which must be wound up. This motor is doing two basic jobs: The first one is to operate a small bellows which supplies air, via a wind chest, to a whistle which produces the birdsong and the second task is to rotate a number of cams. One cam controls the note produced by the whistle, a second determines when the note will be produced and for how long, and a third one produces the motion which causes the bird to turn from side to side. In some movements the flapping of the bird's wings and its ability to turn its head are also cam-controlled, in others not. The final cam determines the point at which the song ends, the bird folds away, the lid drops and the motor stops. The bird's beak movements are always connected to the cam controlling the air supply to the whistle: in this way the sound and beak movements are automatically synchronized.
The whistle consists of a miniature organ pipe containing a close-fitting piston which can be moved up and down to give a range of notes of over an octave.
The winged performer varies in size but 30 mm from beak to tail is common. The bird itself consists of a brass frame to which two half-body shells are attached, each half-shell having one wing pivoted to its side. To dress a few of them, feathers of South American hummingbirds were utilized in the past for their brilliant red, green and blue iridescent colours, which gave a well feathered bird an almost jewel-like appearance, but nowadays they are no longer available.
As for the movement, this is a compact device located between two brass plates. Two mechanisms have been used during the more than two centuries of singing bird boxes, each with its own characteristics: The fusee-driven movement and the going-barrel movement.
Origins and evolution from the 18th to the 21st century
Switzerland: The cradle of the singing bird box and its development (1785–1885) Besides sharing the same nationality, the major names in the early history of the singing bird box are all united by professional links.
To Pierre Jaquet-Droz (born 1721), regarded as one of the most celebrated automata maker of all times, is credited the invention of the boîte à oiseau chanteur. In the book Le Monde des Automates by Chapuis and Gélis record that between 1770 and 1784 several makers including Jaquet-Droz and Jean-Frédéric Leschot (b. 1746) were making singing bird cages in which the bird song was produced by a miniature pipe-organ requiring a separate pipe for each note. The work to miniaturize the mechanical bird and develop a compact movement using a one and only single pipe of variable pitch was all completed in the year 1784/1785 and this component made possible the reduction in size of the movement and as a consequence giving rise to the birth of the singing bird box.
It is possible that this was mainly the work of Leschot, who became a partner in the Jaquet-Droz business in 1782. Indeed, Chapuis and Gélis claim that the variable pitch whistle was the work of Leschot, however another author, Brittens, claims that the credit for its invention belongs to Henri Maillardet (1745–1815), who also joined the company in 1784, although probably Jaquet-Droz should be credited with it. Whoever it was, it is clear that by 1785 snuffbox or tabatière-sized movements were known in France, Germany and England. These mechanisms were the work of a small group of skilled and talented men laboring in Geneva, led by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son (b. 1752) and including Leschot, Maillardet and Jacob Frisard.
In November 1790, Pierre Jaquet-Droz died (followed by his son Henri the year later) and this logically ended the partnership with Leschot. However, Leschot continued to produce singing birds in Geneva under the old partnership name of "Jaquet-Droz & Leschot – London" (they had opened a London office and hence they marked their creations with the city's name, but they were all made in Switzerland). Leschot died in 1824, although he had previously retired years back.
Jacob Frisard is another key name in the history and development of this artifact. Born at Villeret (Switzerland) in 1753, served his horological apprenticeship in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Then, he settled in Geneva around 1784 where he worked for Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and their associate Jean-Frédéric Leschot. He became a great master of singing bird technology, creating some of the most wonderful pieces sold by the Jaquet-Droz firm and contributing to their fame. His close collaboration with Leschot was to result in some of the most important technical innovations in the field; for instance, he was the inventor of the device which enable the bird to be fold back in the box once the song is finished and close the medallion or lid. Around 1800, he set up his own business and sought to show his creations to influential people, including Napoleon Bonaparte and organised an exhibition of his works in Zurich in 1809, but his efforts remained fruitless. In the early years of the 19th century, Frisard embarked on a series of journeys to exhibit his mechanical pieces throughout Europe, he eventually died in 1810 during the return journey to Geneva after a selling trip to Constantinople.
His particular expertise was in designing and cutting the cam sets needed to produce the bird song. He made cams which were arranged in a continuous spiral, so that no break occurred from the beginning of the bird's song to the end. This was a unique feature, never repeated by any other bird box manufacturer. He certainly made many, and possibly all, the cam sets used by the Jaquet-Droz and was also employed by Frères Rochat at the outset of their production.
Frères Rochat (Brothers Rochat). These three brothers from Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux were the sons of the master watchmaker David Rochat (1746–1812). They were: Jacques François Elisée Rochat, (1771–1836), David Frédéric Henri Rochat, (1774–1848) and Henri Samuel Rochat, (1777–1854). David Rochat formed an association with his three sons around 1800. At the end of the 18th and in the early years of the 19th century David Rochat and sons had furnished bird ébauches to Jaquet-Droz, and continued to do so when Jean-Frédéric Leschot took over the Jaquet-Droz firm following Henry-Louis death in 1792. In this they essentially followed the specifications given to them by Jacob Frisard, the singing bird specialist of Jaquet-Droz & Leschot. When Frisard, seeking to develop his own business became less available after 1800, Leschot sought to replace him with the Rochats, but this collaboration was short-lived.
In 1810, Leschot had virtually retired and Frisard had died, so it was left to Frères Rochat to continue to produce high-quality singing bird boxes in the tradition of Jaquet-Droz and so they did until 1849. After the death of their father, the three Rochat brothers moved to Geneva and went into business on their own account opening a shop in 1813. They worked there, in the Terreaux de Chantepoulet, until about 1820, when they split up into two groups. François remained on his own and continued in the Terreaux de Chantepoulet, later aided by his son Ami-Napoléon François (1807–1875), known as Ami. Frédéric and Samuel moved to the rue de Coutance 76, where they were subsequently aided by Frédéric's sons Antoine Auguste Frédéric (1799–1882) and Charles Louis François (1795–1862).
There were also other Rochats working in Geneva at the time. Among them is Louis Rochat, originally from l'Abbaye in the Vallée de Joux, who is considered to be the maker of a piece with clock and singing birds (today in the Peking Museum) which won a prize from the Genevan Réunion des Industriels in 1829. In 1814, Louis and his brother François formed an association along with Pierre Daniel Campiche, called Frères Rochat et Compagnie. To complicate matters, there were ties between the various Rochats. For example, Louis Rochat from l'Abbaye worked with Antoine (son of Frédéric) for a time, around 1850. It is however clear that the Rochat family produced many of the finest and most complex singing bird objects. They also built some of the smallest singing bird boxes ever made.
It should be said that in common with all the aforegoing makers, they did not concern themselves exclusively to this item, they also made other automata and mechanical devices.
Finally, the last of the great master mechanicians in the crafting of tabatières in the true tradition of the Jaquet-Droz, the also Swiss Bruguier family. Charles Abraham Bruguier was born in Geneva in 1788. He would gain great fame in the production of miniaturized songbird snuff boxes (he made other kinds of pieces as well), among his contributions are the improvements in the sound and the extension of the bird's performance, his movements, contained in richly decorated cases often by famous Genevan enamelists such as Richter, Dufey and Procchietto, were also distinguished for its quiet running.
From 1816 until 1822 he resided in London working on musical boxes and automata and it was during this period that his son also named Charles Abraham, was born in 1818. The family returned to Geneva in 1823, where Charles senior began to study the bird boxes of the time and to manufacture them, planning both improvements and methods to increase its production rate and therefore making this article to come within the reach of more people. Movements stamped "C. Bruguier à Geneve", followed by a three figure number, were produced up to about 1850. C. A. Bruguier father continued personally to repair singing birds up to 1861, one year before his death happened in 1862.